Character: Mary _ _ _ _

“she naturally seemed to exude a comforting, matronly calm that instantly becalmed those to whom it was directed that they were with someone who was at once empathetic and in control”

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A “Labeled [sic] for re-use” photo similar to my vision of Mary (I have to say there aren’t many free images of female clergy returned from a Google search). In actual fact, it is The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts SchoriMary was one of the first women to be ordained into the Anglican communion, back in the early 1990s. At the time, she’d been regarded as something of a firebrand, possibly just the sort of mould-breaking radical had been required at the time for such a development to have occurred.

As time passed and her ardour was diminished by the fact she’d been allowed to find her vocation, she’d gradually settled into the more sedate, mundane pleasures of parish priesthood, gratefully swapping Sunday mornings at the pulpit for her prior exertions in the more militant parts of the sub-clergy.

She’d also grown into her role: now in her early sixties, she naturally seemed to exude a comforting, matronly calm that instantly becalmed those to whom it was directed that they were with someone who was at once empathetic and in control. Honed by the many years of tending to her flock, her self-assuredness seemed to permeate her very being: it was impossible to see her flustered, even, as is usually the case, in the most trivial of awkward situations. Keys which remained stubbornly lost were met only with a matter-of-fact…